“The world is a theater curtain behind which are hid the deepest secrets.” – Rabindranah Tagore

Here we examine the scene of the 2009 Honduran elections and its relationship with the military-political coup. The theater has two components: the text and the show. The first covers the history, context, time and space, whether real or imaginary. The second the protagonists, antagonists and both active and passive spectators. The military coup is the staging of electoral theater. The curtain opens with the electoral campaign and ends with legal and legitimate elections for the people; if there is electoral fraud, it does not.

On January 27, 2006 the Liberal Party candidate Manuel Zelaya Rosales assumed the Presidency of Honduras,. It is obvious that Zelaya never did have control of the government since the economic, political, religious and military oligarchy has a hegemonic control of the various branches of government, as well as the political, ideological and media apparatus. Consequently Zelaya could never have brought about a coup and become a dictator.

The military coup was strategically focused on Zelaya himself and tried to reduced the problem, through a barrage of propaganda, to the person of the President himself.

But the coup is not about him, it is larger, it is now against the advance of the historical struggle of the Honduran people, currently represented by the National Resistance against the Military Coup.

The coup hegemony is fed by two means: the illegal war of aggression and drama of the elections in November 2009. The political-military coup responds to a joint national and international program designed to use our territory and to sacrifice the civilian population as an experimental theater of incursions and coups in Latin America. It intends to turn Honduras and Mesoamerica into the Vietnam or Afghanistan of the Americas.

Is it legal to have the electoral process under the almost absolute control of the coup forces? Is the Supreme Electoral Tribunal legal? An organism that violates the content of paragraph 2 of Article 52 of the Constitution of the Republic stating that “judges who are nominated for or hold elective office may not be elected to Supreme Electoral Tribunal; a prohibition mentioned as a specific part of the precept challenged as unconstitutional.”

The election of citizens as Magistrates and Deputy Magistrate Judges of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal is contrary to the Constitution of the Republic under which citizens hold elected positions of popular election, the first as third alderman of Tegucigalpa, the second as Congressman to the National Congress from Francisco Morazán and the third as stand-in Congressman. As stated by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal under Agreement No. 24-2005 published in the Official Gazette number 30,886 on 27 December 2005.

And if the Supreme Electoral Court is not legally composed, will the election be legal? Is it legal for the armed forces, who tortured the legitimate President of the Republic Manuel Zelaya Rosales, who expelled him from the country, who violated the Constitution of the Republic? Their history as supporters of the coup is an indicator of the lack of credibility that the Honduran people have on the outcome of future elections.

And couldn’t panic develop in those voters, men, women and youths who faced persecution, torture and whose relatives were killed by military and police forces?

Can elections be legal when the candidates, presidential, Congressional and mayors of both independent groups and the Democratic Unification Party (UD) have been subjected to torture, persecution and murder of some of its members?

And do not they now have more advantage as far as participation and campaigning those that supported the coup, the Liberal, National, and PINU party over the candidates opposed to the military coup?

Are elections legals in which free speech has been gagged? How can you justify the attacks on Diario Tiempo, the bombings against Canal 11, the militarization and closure of Radio Globo, Cholusat Sur, and the death threats against the director and staff of Radio Progreso and the newspaper El Libertador as well as widespread firings of those honest journalists that worked at media outlets that back the current coup government?

The crux of this story that precedes the vote has been violent, dehumanizing, cruel, degrading and blessed by both the evangelical and Catholic hierarchy, with the false message of the invocation of God, dialogue, democracy and peace while at the same time they beat, torture and persecute massively Members of the Resistance, as well as priests, pastors and nuns.

Behind the scenes of the theatrical scene of elections have operated the local oligarchy, international financial capital, material and intellectual authors of the doctrine of National Security, Low Intensity Conflict War and the Irregular War plans of the Pentagon.

The active international spectators of the electoral theater have condemned the Military Coup and have declared that they will not send observers or recognize the election results.

For passive or neutral viewers, Bertolt Brecht once stated: “The worst illiterate is politically illiterate. He hears, speaks, does not participate in political events … The political illiterate is such a donkey that he takes pride in saying that he hates politics. He does not know that from his ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child and the worst of the bandits who are the corrupt politician, punk and lackey of national and multinational companies. ”

The theater curtain has not yet fallen and the future outcome of Honduras are the scenarios which lead to the return of constitutional order, legal and legitimate elections, the installation of the Constituent Assembly and the transformation of the constitution of the Republic to guarantee respect for human rights, food sovereignty and climate justice.

The other scenario is war. In this regard, the same Brecht added “In wartime, virtues become crimes, religion and honor are used precisely to disguise the real purpose of the war, which is to maintain at all costs the exploitation of the people by the aristocracy and the church .. With war, the rancher’s properties increase, alongside the misery of the pool; The General’s speeches increase, and the silence of the common man grows as well.”

Our human and planetary love and the principles of Non-Violence force us to fight so that on our Mother Earth no Honduran woman or man or citizen of the world is the subject of crimes against humanity or violations of human and planetary rights.

The urgent task is to unite all organizations and individuals that make up the resistance and build the most significant political force in Honduras, to fight for a new people, a new society where true democracy of socio-economic equality prevails; mobilize the conscience of peace and social and climactic justice and against irregular warfare and warring nature that plans more coups and irregular warfare in Latin America.

THE HONDURAN RESISTANCE: A NEW HOPE IS BORNBy Dr. Juan Almendares, October 2009

The military coup in Honduras of 28 June, 2009, has been stripped of its democratic facade. The watchwords of the ‘de facto regime’, that have emerged from the violence, are: “God, Law and Order”.

The regime has openly adopted the methods of Stroessner, the late dictator of Paraguay, on declaring a State of Emergency – in reality a State of Siege – that aims to suppress all resistance and silence all opposition. It has closed down Radio Globo and CHOLUSAT SUR, two principal media houses that have continuously and valiantly provided news on the real situation in Honduras.

The legitimate president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya Rosales, together with his family and associates, have been subjected to physical and psychological torture; and for all practical purposes deprived of their liberty in the embassy of Brazil, in violation of international treaties.

International pressure has forced the de facto regime to dialogue with President Zelaya. But this is a solipsistic dialogue that is being prolonged cynically and endlessly, with the aim of legitimising the forthcoming [November 29th] `presidential elections´ being conducted by the illegal regime under their `democracy´.

The country is divided between the coup forces and the anti-coup forces. The two sides have completely different and antagonistic philosophies, discourses, practices and methods.

“GOD, LAW AND ORDER”

The golpista (coup) philosophy assumes that it is the owner of reality, by right, and by inheritance. This ‘reality’ is fixed and immutable. It is established and sanctified by the god of the powerful and the theology of armed and violent oppression; a reality in which the gilded world of the rich is in confrontation with the oppressive world of the poor and with those who have no right to justice and to love.

The golpistas´ conception of the world is based on an a-historical, ontological vision; one in which the social being has no place and the people do not exist.

It is this frame of reference which justified the military coup that aborted the holding of a non-binding poll – the “Fourth Ballot” – in which the people were to be asked their opinion on the installation of a National Constituent Assembly.

The golpista ideology holds that the “Constitution is God.” It’s advisors and practitioners are disciples of the Pentagon’s ‘School of the Americas’ and of the extreme right in the United States and Latin America.

The epistemology underlying the vision of the golpistas is one that totally ignores the potential of the people as subjects, capable of understanding and changing social reality.

Knowledge and education are a function of the market and of capital accumulation. The regime´s assumptions of its own validity and political legitimacy go along with a kind of legal formalism in which the law is completely separate from social life.

This view is not only perverse but false, for it flagrantly distorts the truth. It denies that a military coup took place, falsifies records and ignores the systematic violations of human rights and corruption.

The method of the golpistas is to promote a “syndrome of attrition and of physical, mental and political exhaustion”. The strategy seeks to defeat the opposition by means of irregular warfare; media, religious and military terrorism; detentions, beatings and torture. It includes assassinations of leaders, teachers, artists, youth and women – femicide has increased by 60 percent.

The economic cost of the military coup, in the first three months, has been over $800 million, implying a loss of nearly $30 million a day.

A GIANT HAS AWOKEN

But in the face of all this pain and suffering a giant has awoken; a new hope has been born. The Honduran people has rediscovered itself. Moved by its dreams of freedom, it acts in defiance of those who have hitherto sought to shut it out from the making of history.

The myths of media power have been shattered. The powerful, with their technology of manipulation, have failed to deceive the people. The walls of silence have collapsed. Charcoal burners, the colours of the earth, have served as tools for the working people and artists in the making of their own history: in writing, painting, dancing, acting, singing the poetry of freedom; confronting tanks, shrapnel, toxic gases and treacherous daggers with shouts of pain and anger: “!Golpistas! Golpistas!”.

NATIONAL FRONT AGAINST THE COUP

A people have been born, a new hope, in the form of the National Front Against the Military Coup. Its objectives are organized mobilization to struggle against injustice, to build political power through genuine participation of the citizenry in the National Constituent Assembly and to profoundly transform the Constitution of the Republic.

Its principles are based on “Non-Violence”. It has sustained over one hundred days of heroic marches under the sun and the rain of bullets, beatings, stabbings and the terror of noxious gases.

However, in a country still under military occupation by the United States, where the cowardly Honduran armed forces and police spend huge amounts of money at the expense of hunger and disease of children and environmental destruction by multinational corporations; they will never extinguish the courage and the voices of nonviolence shouting in every corner of Honduras: ‘Long Live the Resistance!’

The martyrdom and heroism of the Honduran Resistance is a call to all peoples of the world for no more military coups and no more military bases in Latin America.

It is a call for human and world peace; for respect for the dignity of our peoples and for their history; for social and environmental justice in the heart of Mother Earth.

The path of hope and liberation, in the face of crimes against humanity, is through full consolidation of the Resistance as a nonviolent political, cultural and spiritual force that builds and leads the taking of power.

No change that is genuinely democratic can occur if it excludes the National Front Against the Coup as the largest and most significant political force in Honduras. It is the most indisputable historical fact of our present and of the future; a force with which the people dream and are constructing the dawn of a new day for our country.

“Have you ever been inside an empty stadium? Try it sometime. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing emptier than an empty stadium. There is nothing more silent than the stands with nobody in them”. – Eduardo Galeano

For the last five centuries the West and the hegemonic power of multinational colonization have been stealing the essence of life and the aroma of our Honduran lands. They were violent centuries, with massacres of the first peoples. Centuries of immolation and lies, in the name of the cross, “the idea of civilization” and weapons. Centuries antagonistic to the dreams of Lempira, Morazán, Bolívar, Valle and Martí. Centuries of resistance in historic unity by the peoples of Our America.

We were prisoners in the mining and banana enclaves. Wealth at the expense of hunger and misery. The forests were cut down. The mahogany was used to beautify the mansions in Europe, and adorn the doors of the White House in Washington. Agribusiness, agri-combustibles and the loss of alimentary sovereignty increased the treasures of Wall Street, and international financial capital. Honduras was born during the decadence of the old world and the emergence of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny. Invaded by marines and modern pirates, who sang in unison the chorus “In God We Trust” – in God and in the World Bank.

At the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, the 1954 banana workers’ strike took place. The army, guardians of the banana plantations, controlled by the Pentagon and the CIA, put an end to the workers’ movement and participated in the overthrow of the government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala.

In the 80s there is a military occupation of Honduras. The principal strategist, John Dimitri Negroponte, strengthened the National Security Doctrine. The disciples of the School of the Americas put into practice the torture and physical disappearance of people with the acquiescence of the state judicial apparatus.

Since 1956 until the present century, there have been: seven military coups, signifying seven plagues against national progress. The stigmas: “Banana Republic”, “Country for Rent” have injured the national soul. They are damned names that mask a history of crime, corruption and the negation of a people that have always struggled for liberation.

At the end of the 20th century we were hit by Hurricane Mitch; made worse by transnational financial capital that bribes the powers that be, sells territory to the mining companies, textile sweatshops, banana plantations, energy plants, that increase climatic injustice and social poverty.

Over all these centuries, of coups, blows, paquetazos and trancazos (economic packages and beatings), to the mother and fatherland, they have accumulated and assimilated their own experiences and those of other peoples. Unity is constructed in the honey of practice of the social being and in the hell of the condemned of mother earth.

We learn to reject the lies against the people and governments of Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua and the very government of Honduras presided over by Manuel Zelaya; because there is no bigger truth than the generous testimonies of unconditional solidarity in health, education, economy and transport; that we have received from these sister nations.

The Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) is the most concrete expression of human cooperation and fraternity in the face of the unequal trade agreements with the United States and Europe.

In the first decade of the 21st century, June 28th of 2009; the first political, economic and military coup in Latin America takes place, carried out by an armed, religious, political, ideological and media alliance of local powers in tandem with world imperialist powers.

The de facto regime celebrated its repressive power in the patriotic festivities of September 15th. The festivities reminded us of our infancy when we were forced to march in the parades. As children we were dressed in uniform and transformed into “infantry”. We gathered in the stadiums to be passive, tolerant listeners to the despot of the moment. These were like religious rites, football and military rituals, with their generals, captains, bishops, reverends and chaplains and somehow a bad imitation of the carnivals of New York or California.

The lead soldiers marched, the uniformed robots without their masks of crime, the tanks and the canons burned gun powder and shot false canon balls. The speeches were rusty and cheaply patriotic. They debuted maneuvers in F5 planes, the parachute show of a parachute government.

The aerial noise did not scare the vultures that share the misery of the children living in the garbage, vultures that fly making fun of the war planes. It was a Neronian circus with forced students and teachers, beaten and threatened. The horses and the cavalry greeted with honors their great perfumed chiefs in ties. The popular protest could never be heard in a sports stadium empty of all popular warmth.

The National Resistance Against the Military Coup marched challenging the de facto government; rejecting the electoral farce, demanding the return to constitutional order and of president Zelaya. The popular clamor was for a Constitutional Assembly, The Second Independence, and the re-founding of the State of Honduras.

Recognition was expressed of the solidarity of all the peoples and governments, social movements, parties, ecclesiastical communities, women´s organizations, gay groups, human rights organizations, social communicators, worldwide fast, Vía Campesina, Friends of the Earth of Latin America and International Friends of the Earth.

On September 15th millions of Hondurans marched against the military political coup. The popular joy announced a dawning of justice. The hummingbirds jumped for joy and bathed in the dew of the ALBA and savored the nectar of the dreams of liberation. The march was the Biggest Embrace in History, with which the people, poets of liberty, have become poets for all the people of the world.

One month after the military coup d’etat in Honduras and in the wake of widespread reports of human rights violations, the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC) is bringing a delegation of representatives from that country to the U.S. to participate in a speaking tour.

HEAR:Dr. Juan Almendares–internationally known Honduran medical doctor, human rights activist, environmental leader and alternative medicine practitioner; recipient of the 2001 Barbara Chester Award for his ground breaking efforts with prisoners, victims of torture, the poor, and indigenous populations; torture survivor himself, has been targeted by death squads on several occasions.Abencio Fernandez Pineda– coordinator of the non-governmental Center for the Investigation and Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (CIPRODEH) for the western region of Honduras; previously an attorney for the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CODEH) and the Committee of the Relatives of Disappeared Detainees of Honduras (COFADEH).Maria Luisa Jimenez– former police officer in Honduras; denounced the widespread corruption in the police force and now an activist for transparency in government and women’s rights; currently candidate for Honduran Congress with Democratic Union party.Dr. Luther Castillo– named “Honduran Doctor of the Year” by Rotary International’s Tegucigalpa chapter; Garifuna medical doctor and community organizer who directs the Luaga Hatuadi Waduhe?u Foundation (“For the Health of our People” in Garifuna), dedicated to bringing vital health services to isolated indigenous coastal communities; led the Foundation’s construction of Honduras’ first Garifuna Rural Hospital, now serving some 20,000 in the surrounding communities.Gerardo Torres– independent journalist in Honduras; active member of Los Necios, a grass-roots organization that seeks to change the dominant socio-economic dynamics of Honduras.
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Oscar Chacon- Director NALACC- (773)991-9760
Philadelphia International Action Center – 215-724-1618; phillyIAC@action-mail.org

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This is the Philadelphia activist announcement list.

“My heart has a memory / of who the terrorists are. / They are not Muslims, Jews, / Christians, Hindus nor Buddhists. / They are the weapons vendors, / they are the fundamentalists of war, / they are those who sow torture and violence / and imprison the joy of planet earth.”

One month after the interruption of constitutional order in Honduras through a military coup d’etat and in the wake of widespread reports of human rights violations harkening back to events of the 1980s, the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC) is bringing a delegation of civil society representatives from that country to the U.S. to participate in a speaking tour and to advocate for the restoration of constitutional order and respect for human rights.

The tour will start in Washington D.C. with visits to Congressional offices and will be followed by press and speaking events in various U.S. cities, including New York, Boston, and Chicago.

TOUR SCHEDULE:

Wednesday to Friday, July 29-31: Washington D.C.
Saturday to Tuesday, Aug.1-4: New York City, NY
Wednesday and Thursday, August 5-6: Boston, MA
Friday and Saturday, August 7-8: Chicago, IL

MEMBERS OF DELEGATION:

Dr. Juan Almendares is an internationally known Honduran medical doctor, human rights activist, environmental leader and alternative medicine practitioner. He has received recognition for his outstanding and courageous work with victims of torture in Honduras. He is the internationally chosen recipient of the 2001 Barbara Chester Award for his groundbreaking efforts with prisoners, victims of torture, the poor, and indigenous populations. A torture survivor himself, Dr. Almendares has been targeted by death squads on several occasions.

Abencio Fernández Pineda is the coordinator of the non-governmental organization Center for the Investigation and Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (CIPRODEH, by its Spanish initials) for the western region of Honduras. Mr. Pineda was previously an attorney for the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CODEH) and the Committee of the Relatives of Disappeared Detainees of Honduras (COFADEH).

Maria Luisa Jimenez, a former police officer in Honduras, denounced the widespread corruption in the police force and is now an activist for transparency in government and women’s rights. She is currently a candidate for Honduran Congress with the Democratic Union party (UD).

Dr. Luther Castillo. Dr. Castillo is a young Garifuna medical doctor and community organizer who directs the Luaga Hatuadi Waduheñu Foundation (“For the Health of our People” in Garifuna), dedicated to bringing vital health services to isolated indigenous coastal communities. After his 2005 graduation from the Latin American Medical School in Havana, Dr. Castillo returned to the Honduran coast, where he led the Foundation’s construction of Honduras’ first Garifuna Rural Hospital, now serving some 20,000 in the surrounding communities. The hospital opened in December 2007, a few months after Dr. Castillo was named “Honduran Doctor of the Year” by Rotary International’s Tegucigalpa chapter.

Gerardo Torres is an independent journalist in Honduras who is also an active member of Los Necios, a grass-roots organization that seeks to change the dominant socio-economic dynamics of Honduras.